India, Pakistan look to bury the hatchet and create space for betterment of ties.

Liam Fox’s trade department has attempted to bury the hatchet with Britain’s ports and shipping industries with talks over new government funding.

Her interpretation was that the conservatives succumbed to irrational fear; that a better approach may have seen Abbott and his colleagues appreciate the concessions that Turnbull made (such as shifting policy on the National Energy Guarantee), look past superficial differences, and bury the hatchet.

Every year, some 1,200 people make a mad dash for the summit of Mount Everest during the climbing season that begins in May - taking on the arduous (khó khăn, gian khổ; hết sức mình, gắng gỏi), often congested (đông nghịt, chật ních) route to the world's highest peak that most will not complete and some will not survive.

So it should probably come as no surprise if people traipsing up a mountain with its own death zone don't give too much thought to one particular question: What should we do with all this poop (phân)?

In the roughly two months that it takes to climb Mount Everest, the average alpinist will have produced nearly 60 pounds of excrement (phân). This season, porters (cửu vạn) who work on Mount Everest carried down 14 tons of human waste from base camp and other locations. It's dropped into earthen pits on Gorak Shep, a frozen lake bed near a village 17,000-feet above sea level...

Wash Post: The world is on the brink of a historic milestone: By 2020, more than half of the world’s population will be “middle class,” according to Brookings Institution scholar Homi Kharas.

Kharas defines the middle class as people who have enough money to cover basics needs, such as food, clothing and shelter, and still have enough left over for a few luxuries, such as fancy food, a television, a motorbike, home improvements or higher education.

It’s a critical juncture: After thousands of years of most people on the planet living as serfs (nông nô), as slaves (nô lệ) or in other destitute (thiếu thốn, nghèo túng, cơ cực) scenarios (kịch bản, viễn cảnh, viễn tưởng), half the population now has the financial means to be able to do more than just try to survive.

“There was almost no middle class before the Industrial Revolution began in the 1830s,” Kharas said. “It was just royalty (hoàng gia) and peasants (nông dân). Now we are about to have a majority middle-class world.”

(Kharas’s definition of middle class takes into account differences in prices across countries.)

According to the World Values Survey (2015), people in countries with burgeoning middle classes do not feel that governments are responsible for their success, but rather that it is thrift (tiết kiệm, tằn tiện), hard work (lao động cần cù), determination (quyết tâm), and perseverance (bền chí) that count.

Stressed out, overworked, or just over it: Workers in Japan who want to leave their jobs — but don’t want to face the stress of quitting in person — are paying a company called Exit to tell their bosses that they won’t be back.

People hoping to never set foot in their workplace again pay Exit $450 to help them quit their full-time jobs; those who have had it with part-time work can pay around $360. And as Alex Martin reports for Japan Times, “Repeat clients get a [$90] discount.”